The planned British programme paired four heavily protected, 18-inch-gun N3 battleships with four faster, 16-inch-gun G3 battlecruisers. G3 is treated here as a post-World War I battlecruiser rather than a proto-fast battleship because its protection matched contemporary expectations for that role. Together the classes set a difficult design problem for an opponent: a ship strong enough to fight the G3 might not escape the N3, while a ship fast enough to avoid the N3 might not defeat the G3. Both classes sought the most capability that existing British infrastructure could construct and support. In the counterfactual presented here, delaying the treaty settlement to another election cycle could have put all eight ships into service and provoked a much sharper international response. The programme amounted to fleet doctrine and competitive standard-setting rather than two isolated capital-ship designs.
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N3 and G3 as a fleet system
The proposed four N3 battleships and four G3 battlecruisers formed a complementary force intended to make rivals choose between outrunning British strength and outgunning British speed.